River’s End

carry through open windows. “If Tanner wanted to get to her, he’d have found a way. You didn’t lead him here, Noah.”
    “The fucking book.”
    “Maybe he looked at it as a tool, maybe he just wanted the spotlight again.” Frank shook his head. “Or maybe he started out wanting to tell his story, just as he told you. I’ve never been able to get a handle on him. I’ll tell you this, if you don’t keep your head clear, you never will either. And you won’t help her.”
    “My head’s clear.” And his rage was cold. “Clear enough to know if I find him before the cops do, I’ll do more than talk. He’s terrorizing her, and he brought Mom into it. He’s used me for part of it.”
    He strode around the edge of the garden, where the last soft light lay like silk over the celebration of flowers. “Goddamn it. I sat with him. I looked him in the eye. I listened to him. I’m supposed to know what’s inside people, when they’re stringing me along. And I’d started to believe he’d been innocent.”
    “So had I at one point. Why did you?”
    Noah jammed his hands into his pockets, stared into the trees. “He loved her. However fucked-up he was, he loved her. He still does. You can see it when he talks about her. She was it for him. I know what that feels like now. When you have that inside you, how can you get past it to kill?”
    He shook his head before Frank could speak. “And that’s stupid because it happens all the time. Drugs, alcohol, obsession, jealousy. But a part of me bought into it, wanted to buy into it.”
    “You love her. He’s her father. There’s something else, Noah. They found Caryn.”
    “What?” For a minute the name meant nothing. “Doesn’t matter now.”
    “It might. She turned up in New York. Hooked up with a photographer she met at a party. A rich photographer.”
    “Good for her. Hope she stays there. A whole continent between us ought to be enough.” Then he thought of Mike. “Did they pull her in?”
    “She was questioned. Denied it. Word is she got pretty violent in denying it.”
    “Typical.”
    “She also has an alibi for the night Mike was hurt. The party. A couple of dozen people saw her at this deal up in the hills.”
    “So she slipped out for a while.”
    “It doesn’t look like it. The alibi’s holding. We have the time of the attack narrowed to thirty minutes between when Mike got to the house and Dory found him. During that half-hour period, Caryn was snuggled up to the photographer in front of twenty witnesses.”
    “That doesn’t . . .” He trailed off, felt his insides lurch. “Tanner? God.” He dragged his hands free, pressed his fingers to his eyes. “He knew where I lived. He was out by then, and he knew where to find me. The son of a bitch, what was the point?”
    “Did you let him see any of your work?”
    “No, of course not.”
    “Could be as simple as that. He wanted to see where you were heading with it. Top billing was important to him, probably still is. And you’d have names, addresses in your files. Notes, tapes.”
    “Revenge? Does it come down to that? Getting back at the people who testified against him?”
    “I don’t know. But he’s dying, Noah. What does he have to lose?”
    He had nothing to lose. So he sat, sipping his drink and watching night fall. The pain was nicely tucked under the cushion of drugs, and the drugs were dancing with alcohol.
    Just like old times.
    It made him want to laugh. It made him want to weep.
    Time was running out, he thought. Wasn’t it funny, wasn’t it wonderfully funny how it had crawled for twenty years, only to sprint like a runner at the starting block now that he was free?
    Free to do what? To die of cancer?
    Sam studied the gun, lifted it, stroked it. No, he didn’t think he’d let the cancer kill him. All he needed was the guts.
    Experimentally he turned the gun, looked keenly into the barrel, then slipped it like a kiss between his lips.
    It would be fast. And if there was pain, it would be over before it really began. His finger flirted with the trigger.
    He could do it. It was just another kind of survival, wasn’t it? He’d learned all about survival in prison.
    But not yet. First there was Livvy.
    Most of all, there was Livvy.
    Through the meal, no one spoke of it. Conversation ran smoothly, gliding over underlying tensions. After the first ten minutes, Noah gazed at his mother with admiration. She drew Olivia out, chattering on about the Center, asking